The present invention relates to an automatic interpretation service which translates voice uttered by a user into another language and outputs a translation result as voice. The present invention mainly concerns services using a mobile telephone capable of mobile internet access services. However, the present invention also includes voice interpretation services which perform the aforementioned operation by using normal fixed-line telephones, personal computers, mobile information terminals, etc.
Conventionally, there are broadly two types of voice translation systems. One is to translate a free input sentence. The other is to retrieve prepared sentence templates.
As a system for translating free input sentences, for example, JP-A-65424/1997 discloses the voice translation system using a voice recognition server and a wireless mobile terminal. Since free sentences are input, a variety of sentences can be translated in principle. However, high translation accuracy is hardly available, making practical usage difficult.
As a system for retrieving prepared sentence templates, JP-A-88564/1981 discloses the portable translation apparatus which displays categorized sentence templates corresponding to a scene on the screen and outputs voice for a translated sentence selected by a button operation.